Colonial Touches in American Gardens
By Lynne Thompson
Reprinted from Pratt & Lambert Personal Expressions magazine, Spring 2007
Brick-walled formal gardens laid out in exacting geometric designs. Neatly trimmed boxwood edging. Yaupon holly sheared into pyramids, balls, cones and corkscrews.
They’re some of the distinctly English features thousands of visitors admire each year as they tour Colonial Williamsburg’s renowned gardens. Gordon Chappell, director of landscape and facilities services for The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, concedes that the well-tended plots of green in this restored 18th-century capital of Virginia are not exclusively English in origin. He explains that the English had been influenced by the French, who in turn had been influenced by the Italians. “There was this domino effect going all the way back through European gardening history,” he says. But even in a country that became a melting pot of cultures, American gardens continued to reflect a distinctly Anglican flair.
The colonists’ first gardens, of course, were nowhere near as grand as some of their counterparts maintained in Williamsburg. Holly H. Shimizu, executive director of the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., points to the simple rows at Plymouth Plantation, a living museum in Plymouth, Mass., that recreates life in the New World. One of the most popular “rows” that still endures to this day is the dooryard garden, which Shimizu describes as a mix of vegetables, herbs and flowers that flanks the front door and extends down either side of the path. The arrangement both welcomed visitors to the home with color and fragrance and provided occupants with easy access to green staples. “You could walk right outside and harvest,” she says. Laura Viancour, coordinator of garden programs at The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, says most of the herbs we’re familiar with today were among the first plants brought over from England because of their culinary and medicinal value.
“Until the recent interest in heirloom varieties, the fruits and vegetables were more diverse than what we usually could find – several different kinds of apples, several different kinds of carrots,” she adds. “Broccoli was white, green and purple.”
Viancour says that Williamsburg settlers cultivated the same combination of plants in a simple geometric “four-square garden,” a garden divided into quadrants by a walk and crosswalk. The gardens of wealthy residents such as the governor, however, boasted more elaborate ornamental plans. The rise of an affluent class from the sale of cash crops such as tobacco also provided the time and money to indulge in the exchange of exotic plants with the motherland. “The English, from very early on, were great plant explorers,” the result of a globe-spanning British Empire, Chappell says. According to Viancour, the colonists would send over native plants such as phlox and catalpa trees and receive specimens such as peonies and bulb flowers. The latter, like topiaries and boxwood, were popularized by King William, an English monarch of Dutch descent who had tulips and such planted in palace gardens. Even obtaining the common marigold was considered a coup – the seeds were often eaten by rats and/or damaged by salt water during shipping.
“It took several attempts to be successful in the exchange of plants,” Viancour says.
And, of course, there were roses, a flower with which the English have long been associated. According to Shimizu, one of the first roses brought to America was the apothecary rose, which was harvested and dried for its astringent and medicinal properties as well as its intense fragrance and flavor. “In Martha Washington’s cookbook, there are recipes for rose petals,” she says. Fresh petals, like herbs, were strewn on the floors of homes and churches to freshen the air. The obsession with cross- breeding for a wider variety of shapes and colors – even blue – didn’t develop in America until the 19th century.
By the 1740s, the enclosed geometric gardens were being replaced by more natural English landscape counterparts where space permitted. Viancour describes sweeping expanses punctuated by clumps of trees, large manmade ponds and hills, gazebos and pavilions. A century or so later, Chappell says well-heeled Americans were implementing the hallmarks of beaux arts gardens they admired while traveling in England. “The gardens of the great English country houses affected the gardens of the great country houses of the United States all the way through the 1930s and 1940s,” he says. While the style boasted geometric layouts, terraced levels, statuary, staircases, and reflecting pools, the plants were to a large degree allowed to retain their natural shape and beauty.
At the same time, another style of gardening was peaking in popularity among the Victorians: the cottage garden, a blowsy mix of herbs, vegetables, vines, small shrubs, small fruiting trees, and a multitude of flowers, usually enclosed, at the front of the house. “Plants were encouraged to grow almost helter-skelter, to combine and weave and tie themselves together,” Chappell explains. The style has enjoyed a resurgence since the 1960s among Americans who desire a freer form of gardening.
But Chappell says the lush, manicured lawn as we know it remains “the quintessential English contribution to the landscape world.” Before Englishman Edwin Budding invented the mechanical lawnmower in the first quarter of the 19th century, lawns were more like meadows, cut with a scythe or by grazing livestock. “The advent of the lawnmower made the lawn more practical,” he says.
Similarly, the English seed catalogs mailed to the United States continue to play a part in dictating what Americans plant. “Many of the old standby seed companies in the United States – Burpee, Ball, Park Seed – still rely to a very large degree on English sources for many of their seeds,” Chappell adds. And the English continue to take home plants from North America and send back improved versions. Chappell cites the fireworks goldenrod, distinguished by its multitude of fluffy golden sprays on nearly horizontal flowering spikes, as an example. Indeed, it is that level of horticultural research and development that keeps the sun from setting on the influence of English gardening.